Professor Elabbas Benmamoun

Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

 

THE ARABIC LANGUAGE: A HISTORICAL AND LINGUITIC SURVEY

Thursday September 20^th

4:30 p.m.

Old Main 201

 

Interest in the study and teaching of the Arabic language has been steadily increasing for a variety of reasons.  Among these reason are (1) the prominence of the geographical area where Arabic is spoken as a native language or is an official language (the majority of the countries of the Arab league), a geographical area that stretches from the Persian Gulf to North Africa, in addition to Sub-Saharan countries and other countries where Arabic is a minority language; (2) the developments in information technology and computational linguistics and the increasing interest to extend the reach of the research to languages such as Arabic, particularly its spoken colloquial varieties; and (3) the fact that Arabic, with its vast diversity and diglossic nature, provides a rich testing ground to explore linguistic issues such as agreement, word order, root and pattern morphology, second language acquisition, heritage agreement, word order, root and pattern morphology, second language acquisition, heritage languages, diglossia and code switching, language change  and micro-variation, among others.